Regardless of whether you’re dealing with a top-down process * (thoughts triggering panic), or a bottom-up process* (sensory data triggering anxious thoughts triggering physical symptomes), the results are the same. The stress cycle kicks in, causing your mind to check its files for what could possible be causing such dreadful symptoms.

As your mind scrambles frantically to figure out what the hell is going on, the questions it asks you begin to spin out of control. Here are some of the usual suspects:

“What’s happening?”

“I think I’m having a heart attack!’

“I feel like jumping out of my skin!”

“Something must be terribly wrong for me to be feelings this bad.

“I must have stomach cancer.”

“Oh, no! What if I die and my kids have to get along without me?”

“I’m not psychotic, so why is my body going crazy?”

This is the Stress Cycle, our primitive, 100% natural, survival reactions kicking in when we perceive a threat to our mental or physical symptoms. Basically, it’s a runaway train fueled by adrenaline, and kept alive by anxious thought.

A panic attack is when the Stress Cycle keeps firing when there’s no relief. As Claire Weekes (Hope and Help for Your Nerves—the best book ever written on anxiety) says, “Anxiety is nothing more than oversensised nerves kept alive by bewilderment and fear.”